NEW YORK — “I’m like a sight gag,” said Adam Driver, who plays the ugly-handsome,
so-awful-to-Hannah boyfriend on the HBO comedy
Girls.

“I have this really big face,” added Driver, whose powerful head suggests a public monument and
whose striking features one writer called “worthy of the Mongolian plains.”

“Costume people are always saying they don’t have clothes big enough for me,” said Driver, who
at 6-foot-3 is a veritable giant in an industry where

5-foot-10 is the median height for heartthrobs.

Driver finds himself on the eve of the hit cable show’s highly anticipated third season (the
show returns in January) both a breakout star and, more curious still, an unexpected new favorite
of fashion.

In the past year, the 30-year-old actor has shot
This Is Where I Leave You, an indie film about a family having to observe the weeklong
Jewish mourning period of
shiva in accordance with their father’s final wishes; played a comic in the Coen brothers’
Inside Llewyn Davis (out on Friday); portrayed a photographer on a 1,700-mile camel
journey through the Outback in
Tracks; and filmed
While We’re Young, a new Noah Baumbach movie in which he stars with Ben Stiller and Amanda
Seyfried.

Somehow, he also found time to model for a September
Vogue pictorial shot in Ireland by Annie Leibovitz and for Gap’s recent “Back to Blue”
fall ad campaign, which marked the brand’s return to TV advertising.

“I don’t totally get it,” the actor said. “When I read for
Girls, I was, like, the script says ‘Handsome Carpenter,’ so someone else is going to get
the part.”

“He has this amazing presence, this thoughtfulness,” Dunham said. “The articles about him don’t
say what an amazing actor he is, but ... just watching him work is freaky.”

Driver characterizes his
Girls character, Adam Sackler, as “part poet, part rhinoceros and part Neanderthal.”

If all the recent hype, including an Emmy nomination, has gone to the actor’s head, he does a
credible job of concealing it.

“The deadly thing in my job is to attach too much meaning to everything,” Driver said.

Of the many items on a resume not crammed with success predictors (a preacher’s son born in San
Diego; raised, after his parents’ divorce, in Mishawaka, Ind., by a homemaker mother and a preacher
stepfather; a below-average student at Mishawaka High School; a door-to-door salesman of vacuum
cleaners and basement waterproofing), the signature entry is his stint as a Marine.

“I’d like to say it was patriotic to join the Marines,” Driver said, “but it was also that I was
doing nothing honorable with my life and spending too much time at McDonald’s.

“In the military, you learn the essence of people. You see so many examples of self-sacrifice
and moral courage.

“In the rest of life, you don’t get that many opportunities to be sure of your friends.”